In quite an unexpected move, Nokia has launched a cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own.  The net cash outlay from Nokia to purchase the approximately 52% of Symbian Limited shares it does not already own will be approximately 264 million euros.

Nokia acquired Symbian because it plans to turn it into a non profit foundation. The new formed foundation will have a board of directors that will be equally divided between the partners of the deal which include mobile phone manufacturers Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericson, Samsung and LG, chip manufacturers Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics NV, and wireless operators Vodafone, AT&T and NTT DoCoMo.

Sony Ericsson and Motorola today announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ to the Symbian Foundation while DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets.

From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. The operating system will be released under a royalty free license and is expected to attract more and more companies to adopt it to run on their devices.

This year already, over 20 new mobile phones have been announced on Symbian OS v9. All of the world’s top five handset manufacturers have announced new Symbian OS models and more will come to market this year with volumes continuing to grow.

Nokia’s move to make Symbian an royalty-free operating system is clearly a response to Google’s Android.

In fact, last year when Google announced Android and Open Handset Alliance, many analysts noted that Nokia was one of the major absentees.

Meanwhile, Google’s universal operating system for mobile phones, Android, is in hot waters after on Monday The Wall Street Journal has published an article about the status of handsets based on the new OS.

According to the sources quoted by the financial newspapers the first mobile phones running on Android will be unveiled in the fourth quarter of this years or maybe even in the early 2009.

The report follows after rather crude prototypes were unveiled in mid-February at the GSMA Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. They were in great contrast with fully-designed gems like the latest Nokia phones. Google has lined up about 30 phone, chip and software companies to help develop Android-based devices.

However, Google said they remain on schedule for the second half of the year launch, while at the same time saying they are excited to see the momentum built around Android by carriers, handset manufacturers, developers and consumers.

Earlier this month, Google also stated that it is on track with the open-source mobile OS and that its partners are also ready to ship Android phones before the end of the year.